And I bequeath my emails to ...

People are including instructions in their wills about how to handle their email inboxes and social media profiles after they die, a lawyer says.

Slater and Gordon succession lawyer Rod Cunich said the firm introduced provisions for handling clients' digital property in its automated and standard wills, after a number with "valuable digital assets" had asked whether it provided estate planning services for social media profiles and online property, including photos and emails.

Mr Cunich, head of the firm's estate planning and wealth management division, said that historically people had passed on their photo albums to the next generation. But they were increasingly storing personal information online only.

"People are creating online or digital assets all the time but they don't consider or manage them as assets," he said.

"A lot of our photographs are now taken on our smart phones, immediately uploaded to Facebook or Flickr or other online service providers. There's no [physical] copy of them kept anywhere. Often it's not even stored on a hard drive of a computer. When a person passes away, what happens to all those photographs?"

Some clients wanted to include instructions about their social media profiles, he said.

Advertisement

Many US social networking websites and email providers included options for deceased users' profiles in their terms and conditions. For example, Facebook pages could be closed or put in a "memorial" state – keeping them online with only previously confirmed friends able to access or post on it – if an executor or parent with proof of their authority requested it.

Others wanted to specify who was entitled to their computers. "Information stored on the hard drive of your computer, smart phone or tablet, can be anything, [for example] a draft book that you're writing," Mr Cunich said.

People with online businesses and those who automatically saved their passwords for shopping websites and email accounts on their home computers for convenience could leave these open to abuse after they died and before their executor took control of their estates, he said.

"Whoever gets control of the computer, provided they've got the passwords, can access all that information and either delete it or pass it on to people who might have an interest in it," he said.

"So one of the things you would need to authorise an executor to do is to remove all that personal data from those accounts."

While concerns about what to do with online identities after death were nascent in Australia, Mr Cunich said that they were growing in the US, where seven of its states had passed laws around transferring digital property.

This follows the Victorian Law Reform Commission's report on the state's succession laws. Last month, it recommended that the range of the next of kin who can potentially inherit from a person who dies without a will be limited to prevent unmeritorious claims eating into the estate.

Mr Cunich said that succession laws would later need to cater similarly for digital property.

"If there's money to be had, greed will follow it," he said. "Whether it's friends or family, as more valuable virtual property is created and forms part of someone's overall wealth, there will be people looking to get their fingers around it."

Terms and Conditions

Facebook: Facebook will agree to close the account with proof of an executor's authority, or of parents' identity in the case of a deceased minor. Such people could also ask the profile to be put in a "memorial" state so it stays live with only confirmed friends able to access or post on it.

Twitter: Won't close account but will turn off the "follow me" option on deceased peoples' profiles if an authorised person requests this.

Hotmail: Will grant access to executors with a death certificate and proof of their authority.

Yahoo: Any emails on Yahoo accounts belong to the company and are protected by privacy laws. "If someone dies, the only only way to get access to the emails is to sue them and you may or may not be successful."